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The Bene Gesserit were called so during a technological era on Terra. Sister Maura Macume worked with early thought machines which the Sisterhood saw as an expedient means of streamlining the programming of its breeding programs. The Mother House in Wallachia kept its own mnemonic records of the charts, into which the machineprogrammed
breeding charts were integrated, allowing now more complex experimental breeding patterns.

Sister Sierre Kaikilani was the chief programmer for the off- Terran exploration undertaken by a political coalition of the northern, southern, and western powers and knew the infiltration of the controllers of the thought machine by the Sisterhood. The Mother House, through Sierre and other women like her, used the expedition to develop the eventual seeding and breeding plans for off-Terran colonization.

Sister Glenna Riche witnessed the first global attempt to regularize the structure and training of the "Bene Gesserit". Wallachia had lost its name and political integrity, and an extensive underground network of women working within their separate political jurisdictions developed centers where breeders were educated, breeding charts were maintained, and new skills such as psycholinguistic analysis were developed.

At this time the southern unit had emerged from its millennia of political stasis to compete as an equal political power, strengthened by control of a major energy source. Thus the women of the south were finally free to join the Sisterhood as active participants.

Until then, memory transferences were controlled primarily through nonchemical, physiological and psychological training techniques, but during that time the process used for memory activation among the Reverend Mothers evolved. Apparently a rapidly developing chemistry simplified the physiological and psychological memory transferences.

A radical southern Bene Gesserit unit developed a chemical stimulant to activate latent males, and in the process produced a savior figure who led a jihad to rid the world of "corrupt Modern Infidels." After years of devastating war in the southern territory, the Mother House finally directed an assassination which eliminated the core of the jihad.

Another, northern radical unit sought a chemical process to activate the male memory
within an active female since men proved extraneous, unsuitable saviors, having failed in this role over these millennia. They planned to collect, flash-freeze, and store breeder semen and then to eliminate men completely. The Mother House dispatched this unit before they could implement their theory.

Women gained some public power, even governing for brief periods here and there and it was a time for the Mother House to establish strong educational units in politically powerful societies.

The schools already developed basic training used by the Bene Gesserit for millennia, in an interesting combination of eastern, southern, and northern training techniques. Finally the global network was completed.

The Bene Gesserit was active, during the Exploration period, and by the time of
colonization had covertly taken control of programming the seeding machines.

Disputes raged over the basic purpose of the Sisterhood. For instance, Voice Glenna is caustic in her comments about the "primitive"
breeders and their desire for a male
savior. As spokesperson for her
northern unit, she disdains the notion of
a dominant male power and sees the
premise of universal consciousness as
an ancient, "unsophisticated" folk myth.
For her, breeding for political and
economic power is the order's primary
goal. But western philosopher Voice
Dorins says, "There are too many race
memories and too many holocausts in
our history for any sane person to
assimilate." A southern Voice,
however, disagrees with both. Voice
Saadhiina argues that the "technocrats"
are short-sighted because of their
separation from nature and because of
their lust for machines rather than
respect for ecology. She calls her
northern and western sisters "water-fat"
and "machine lazy," asserting that they
have lost their humanity and wish to
breed with the thought machines. For
her, a male savior is the primary goal.
The Voices continue this argument
well into the Age of the Machine. A
poignant comment is made by Voice
Sedilious: "We strive for one who ends
our strife. But in our striving, we work
for that which will work against us.
Only by not knowing where we go can
we advance. When we have found our
future, we will be embedded in time as
the fly is in the amber. Later Voices,
however, speak disparagingly of Voice
Sedilious, calling her an "Unheard
Non-Breeder."

Though the Sisterhood became
heavily dependent on thought
machines, one branch remained
devoted to mnemonic recordspreserving
the Summa and the Mikkro-
Fishedotte through the Butlerian Jihad.
Other ancient volumes such as the
Azhar Book and the Panoplia
Propheticus were likely protected in
the same way. R.M. Treac suggests that
the Founding Legends, always assumed
to be apocryphal, may actually be
historical. For example, she notes that
the Voices from this period
consistently refer to Wallach IX as the
Mother World, as if that planet had
always been dominated by Bene
Gesserit.

A Voice Sabhaatha from a
period well into colonization reports
that the Sisterhood used thought
machines to program an early
missionary group sent to newly
inhabited planets as cultural ecologists,
but whose real purpose was to implant
protective myths, the Missionaria
Protectiva, for future breeders.
Throughout this period, the Sisterhood
continued to dominate the
programming for colonization,
carefully establishing breeding charts
and programs, though it tried with
mixed success to retain a public image
as a religious teaching order. The noted
cultural ecologist Corrihos Maliaronno
theorizes that the Bene Gesserit
recognized the relationship between
ecology and social vitality, thus
choosing positive though varied
ecological settings for the breeders.
From her work with the Voices tapes,
Maliaronno surmises that offshoots of
southern Terran cultures were
particularly well situated on semi-arid
and arid worlds, being historically
compatible with the harsh climates and
productive of hardy new cultures. She
finds evidence that the Zensunni
Wanderers and their descendants, the
Fremen, inhabiting worlds drawing on
their socio-ecological heritages,
produced particularly vital breeding
groups (vital enough to be eventual
breeders of the Kwisatz Haderach).
Maliaronno also argues that temperate
worlds produced more sophisticated
but less hardy breeders, fee Atreides
being an exception rather than a norm.
She is also studying Voice Mahtinka
from the Chapter House on Dendros
because that purely agrarian world also
produced hardy breeders.

Not content with their rule over single planets, priestesses and sorceresses saw advantages in joining together (their own form of ecumenical movement) so that they might shape the universe. Thus flourished the power of the Bene Gesserit and the establishment of their breeding program.

From fee records in the Raids
Hoard authenticating the Voice
commentaries, we are now sure that
Bene Gesserit of Hidden Rank Jehanne
Butler was the instigator and early
leader of fee Butlerian Jihad. [See
Harq al-Ada's The Butlerian Jihad, Lib.
Conf. Temporary Series 28, or R. Siik's
The Emergence of Jehanne Butler
(Thor: Valkyrie) far older and newer
views less certain of the Bene Gesserit
role in the Butlerian Jihad. — Ed.]
Voice Maharinih gives information
about the culture and fee Bene Gesserit
activities just prior to fee Jihad. One
dominant, pseudo-religious belief
which developed during fee early
Exploration period was that a powerful
anima, a feminine element governing
intuitive understanding, was present in
all psyches. This belief was actually a
distortion of an early Bene Gesserit
Mother Goddess ideology which had
been submerged in a scientific
discipline, psychology. Wife space
exploration, humans venturing into fee
"heaven" of the gods, mythic beliefs
were challenged by human technology,
causing a conflict which the Bene
Gesserit missionaries used to their
advantage as they promoted intuitive
reasoning to counter strictly data-based
technological reasoning. This conflict
between the rational and fee intuitive
continued well into the colonization
period, but Voice Maharinih points out
feat as economic and political factions
united in an inter-world trade
federation, the technocrats gained
control, dominating the less
economically important "humanistic"
forces. Because fee thought machines
controlled fee economies of fee new
worlds, fee people on these worlds
became dependent on "machinethought"
— objective, non-emotional,
non-intuitive behavior. The Bene
Gesserit likewise became highly
machine-dependent, teaching "rational
thought" in its educational institutions,
and limiting its intuitive work to the
ideologists seeding mythos on new
worlds. During this period fee Bene
Gesserit Creed of Linked Rationality
was adopted: "Before us all methods of
learning were tainted by instinct. We
learned how to learn. Before us
instinct-ridden researchers possessed a
limited attention span — often no
longer than a single lifetime. Projects
stretching across fifty or more lifetimes
never occurred to them." Only when
the Mother House realized feat
machines were decreasing human
control, breeding humans into nonintelligent
work animals, and
systematically aborting any Bene
Gesserit breeder, did the Bene Gesserit
plan a revolt. The order now added the
famous "First Lesson" to the training
program: "Humans must never submit
to animals" — fee machine-bred nonhumans
must be eliminated along with
the machines. The Chapter House on
Komos became the center for planning,
being one of fee few planets not yet
controlled by fee machines. But the
abortion of Jehanne Butler's daughter
sparked fee actual revolt: Sarah Butler
would have borne fee Kwisatz
Haderach.

Through the Jihad, the Bene
Gesserit was preserved by fee
geographical locations of its Mother
House and chapter houses and by its
public association with religion,
education, and humanism. Wallach IX,
being a neutral planet, became a refuge
for humanist intellectuals, most of
whom had been trained in Bene
Gesserit institutions. The Summa was
thus preserved, the breeding records
safe in mnemonic holders and in the
ancient bound volumes in fee Archives.
At this stage the Sisterhood abolished
its own experiments with artificial
insemination, declaring that "For fee
Sisterhood, mating mingles more than
sperm and ovum. We wish to breed and
capture psyches, an accomplishment
possible only through human to human
interaction." The Summa shows that the
Bene Gesserit continued its breeding
program after the Jihad through
planned marriage and selective
concubinage, soon controlling the
breeding lines of the Major and Minor
houses which developed during the
Imperium.

Details of the post-Jihad
reorganization of the order into a
publicly acknowledged, influential
agency are given by Voice Reverend
Mother Tercitus Marianna Clarique.
The reorganization made public fee
primary ranks of the order, but the
Sisterhood continued to use Hidden
Rank as needed. Some of the more
important chapter houses became wellknown
empire research institutions (the
Komos Chapter House was reorganized
as the Primary Research and Genetic
Science Institute on the newly named
Ix). But the political strength of the
Bene Gesserit in its new public role
came not so much from its educational
institutions as it did from its ideology
of "humanness."

The Sisterhood gained access to
political centers by serving as
"truthsayers." During the Machine era,
leaders depended totally on "liedetectors"
to determine veracity in any
negotiation. With the loss of these
machines, and as Voice Clarique adds,
"with no reestablishment of human
trust," the Bene Gesserit truthsaying
training made the Sisterhood a
necessary part of all major, and most
minor, political and economic
meetings. The Bene Gesserit was
employed in this service within every
major House and later also became
involved with the Guild. As Voice
Clarique notes, there were few secrets
from the Bene Gesserit. She adds that
the order also made public its "gom
jabbar" test as a means of insuring that
no machine-bred animals were allowed
to masquerade as humans. The public
remained hostile to these machinebreeds
for centuries, a condition that
allowed the Sisterhood more freedom
to test its own breeding line for
sensitivity and for Kwisatz Haderach
potential. The details, also, of the Bene
Gesserit activity in the C.E.T. and the
influence of the Azhar Book on the
Orange Bible are discussed by Voices
who participated in the work Fatha
Mecq, expert on the Guard Bible,
contends that remnants of the
Sisterhood's influence can still be
found in the Holy Church (see her
monograph, "Azhar Echoes for Today"
Sofia 489:191-250).

Later Voices also claim that the
Bene Gesserit was known throughout
the Imperium as a religious service and
teaching order: women devoted to truth
and virtue whose mission was to lead
society out of the holocaust following
the machine era into a new era based
on the combined powers of intellect
and intuition. Late in the second
Imperial millennium, the Sisterhood
added an amendment to its Creed:
"Reserve an attitude of distrust for
anything that comes in the guise of
logic." This addition came partly in
response to machine-thought but also
as a counter to a new, competitive
teaching order, the Mentats (founded in
1234), who sought to replace machinethought
with perfect human logic.

While the Sisterhood employed many
of the same analytical methods as the
Mentats, the order argued that the
universe could not be completely or
accurately understood through isolated
objective analysis. Such analysis was
useful in individual events, but
synthesis was gained through intuitive
interpretation. Throughout this period,
though, the Voices agree that though
the overt image of the order was that of
service, the actual objective of the
educational and breeding programs was
to gain control of the power bases of
the empire. The ancient desire for a
humanity united by an active male
consciousness apparently had been
forgotten, submerged in a singleminded
objective of breeding a
Kwisatz Haderach who would rule the
empire. As Xlecthian of Ix said early in
the God Emperor's reign, "The problem
of getting what one wants comes in
discovering too late what one has asked
for."

In her Commentaries to the
Voices, Our Lady and Mother Ghanima
discusses the irony that both the jihads
in our history were begun by Bene
Gesserits, but she also points out the
differences between the two women.
Jehanne Butler began with a wellthought-
out purpose and with the full
support of the order but Lady Jessica,
Our Lady's grandmother, deviated from
the order's plans, disrupted its purpose,
worked against her own mother,
Reverend Mother Gaius Helen
Mohiam, and began a course of history
which eventually deprived the Bene
Gesserit of most of its power. Our Lady
and Mother adds that the motherline of
the God Emperor had been obscure
until her work with the Voices. Leto II
refused to acknowledge his connections
with an order he so clearly detested,
and Our Lady adds that her discovery
was further hindered by the
suppression of Mohiam's Voice by the
Voices of both Jessica and Paul.

When Lady Jessica produced a
male rather than the prescribed female
child, the order discounted the birth,
even though Jessica's daughter would
have been bred to produce a Kwisatz
Haderach. More importantly, when
Mohiam tested her grandson with the
gom jabbar, discovering an unusual
degree of strength in him, she kept the
test results a secret, giving the
Sisterhood no warning that a potential
Kwisatz Haderach was among them.
[The Emperor Paul confirmed the gom
jabbar test, but we have only the word
of the Bene Gesserit that the R.M.
Gaius Helen Mohiam did not report its
results. Why should she not have
informed her order about the possible
success of a twenty-thousand-year
plan? One need not be overly skeptical
to suspect that the B.G. failure to coopt
Paul is here being extenuated by
making a scapegoat of Gaius Helen
Mohiam, — Еd.]

Thus Muad'Dib's power came as
a surprise to the order, and its attempts
to control his breeding proved
completely ineffectual. Our Lady, in
her Commentaries, is quite critical of
the Sisterhood:
One must understand the stance of the Bene
Gesserit during Jessica's time to appreciate how
completely off-guard they were to the
possibility of. as "accidental" Kwisatz
Haderach. For eight thousand years at least this
group of women had been deeply embroiled in
their breeding charts and their marriage
bartering, all in the name of producing their
"savior." The possibility of such an event
actually occurring was lost in the immediacy of
their struggle to attain profane power. Also,
(hey had no real experience in dealing with a
"savior." The nearest they had come was
Hasimir Fenring, a man they and everyone else
took much too lightly. Therefore, when Jessica
produced a son rather than a daughter, the
Sisterhood was more angry than alarmed. And
when this child was tested by the gom jabbar,
no one had enough sense to pay attention to the
results. They had really lost track not only of
their purpose but also of their history, unable to
foresee the possibilities presented when this
extraordinary boy was placed within an ancient
culture, prepared by tradition for the arrival of a
superhero. The order had "mislaid" the Fremen
and with them the seeded mythos preparing
them for a savior. The Bene Gesserit received a
well-deserved fate.

The Eulogy for an Ideal, an
anonymous poem included with the
Commentaries, indicates that when
Leto II gained ultimate power and
preempted the Sisterhood's breeding
program, the order lost its most
valuable entree into the power
structure. The Journals also show his
constant antipathy, if not outright
hatred, of the order. Leto managed to
change what had been a potent political
force into a subservient order of
educators and historians. Because Leto
controlled the spice supply, the Bene
Gesserit had little choice but to accede
to his wishes, to humor him, and to
serve him as efficiently as possible.
Through this period, though, the
Journals indicate that the Sisterhood
was never completely subdued. There
is evidence that the order was involved,
periodically, in conspiracies to destroy
him.

Leto also took control of the
Sisterhood's seeded mythologies,
turning them into the basis for his new
religion, and that action must have
been the ultimate degradation to the
order. Only after the Scattering and the
Starvation did the Bene Gesserit regain
some of its status. Its ancient axiom
had held true: "Survival is the ability to
swim in strange waters." From the
records still guarded in the Archives,
we learn that the waters following the
God Emperor were strange indeed, and
that the Bene Gesserit went through
many overt shape shiftings in its
attempt to survive.

The universal consciousness for
which the ancient Sisterhood strove
apparently was fulfilled in Leto II, but
at super-human cost. As The Holy
Books of the Divided God indicate, the
universal consciousness which might
have given stability to a tribe of Terran
primal humans became, instead, the
force that changed the texture and
pattern of our complex universe. We
have learned enough from these initial
investigations of the Bene Gesserit
material in the Rakis Hoard to show us
how little we really know of a past
more ancient than we had supposed
possible.

When the BG analyzed syntax, they used "generative grammar", a system already ancient when the empire was founded. Its basic tenet was that finite concepts and finite elements of language from a finite mind can result in infinite "rule-governed creativity", a potential similar to DNA. Linguistic structures were called "derived" (developed by "transformational rules" from more basic structures).

The BG studied the main galactic languages and their dialects to identify what puts the fingerprint of the speaker. This served to understand others and how the mind reveals itself.

One subject of study was "Language-Thought Orientation", the way in which language and thought intermingle. For example by observing flexure of facial muscles, pulsebeat in the neck, pupils and other signs of tension, they could determine whether a speaker was a native of a language or not.

They would sometimes make an impostor betray himself by withholding responses and recognition signals, increasing the tension of the speaker; the BG would then lead the conversation in "Diagnostics" topics to present further hesitation points from a range of languages.

Liber Ricarum mentioned one such Diagnostic concerning linguistic specializations in a certain way of life, recognized by words, assumptions and structures.

For example, a novice and aspirant might be asked to divide a set of sentences into two groups:

The emperor realizes (something)

The emperor regrets (something)

The emperor believes (something)

The emperor knows (something)

The emperor says (something)

The emperor claims (something)

The expected answer is the grouping of the sentences in 1-2-4 (the speaker accepts the truth of the clause (something) shared also by the emperor) and 3-5-6 (no commitment by the speaker about the (something))